Source: Aftermath
Developers fear that AI systems trained on freely available game demos can extract enough game logic, art, and mechanics to substantially reduce development costs for competitors, making the demo-as-marketing-tool economically untenable. This is a concrete threat to a specific business practice—free demos as discovery and trust-building tools that have worked for decades—where the calculus shifts if a studio can train a model on your vertical slice instead of building from scratch. The pressure point isn't copyright law but whether studios will simply stop distributing demos if the competitive disadvantage outweighs the marketing benefit.